Belial and His Ranseur

Belial is less a demon than a devil, if such differentiations make a whit of difference once something with glowing red eyes and horns is standing in front of you.

In the older demonological tradition, Belial occupies an unusually elevated position among the infernal ranks. His name appears much earlier than the elaborate hierarchies of Hell that later occult writers constructed around him, and its meaning evolved considerably over the centuries. The biblical word belial originally carried a sense closer to worthlessness or wickedness than the proper name of one particular supernatural being. Eventually Belial became personified: not merely evil, but an individual representative of it.

And apparently a very handsome one.

Belial is frequently imagined as beautiful, aristocratic and diabolical rather than monstrous. He is the devil who doesn't particularly need to frighten you. He can persuade you. Later occult traditions make him a king among demons, associated with power, status, influence and corruption. Artists and writers have consequently had plenty of room to imagine him as infernal royalty: tall, imposing, richly dressed and entirely aware of his own magnificence.

Which brings me to his fork.

The weapon Belial is carrying in the illustration above is most accurately described as a ranseur, one of the enormous family of polearms humans spent centuries inventing before apparently deciding we had finally developed enough different ways to put a sharp piece of metal on the end of a stick.

I became interested in these weapons after seeing examples at the Art Institute of Chicago. Halberds, bills, partisans, ranseurs, military forks—each is essentially a variation on the same basic proposition, yet each develops its own personality. Some chop. Some stab. Some hook. Some catch another weapon. Some appear designed primarily to make the person holding them look like somebody you shouldn't approach with a complaint.

A ranseur is especially interesting because of its trident-like head. A long central blade is accompanied by two smaller lateral projections, producing something halfway between a spear and a fork. Those side pieces weren't necessarily intended simply to make three holes instead of one. Depending upon the weapon's construction, projections on polearms could help catch, control or deflect an opponent's weapon.

But I'm less interested in exactly what the ranseur did on a medieval battlefield than in what it looks like.

It looks like a devil's weapon.

That got me thinking about weapons as appendages of personality. Give the same mythological creature a sword and you change him. Give him an axe and you change him again. A dagger suggests intimacy. A sword can suggest nobility or martial authority. An axe suggests force. A scythe arrives already carrying centuries of symbolism concerning harvest and death.

But what type of creature uses a fork?

Poseidon has his trident. The traditional Christian devil eventually acquired his pitchfork. Demons are forever being depicted with barbed, hooked and forked instruments. Perhaps there's something fundamentally unsettling about dividing the point of a weapon. A spear has a single intention. It points directly at you.

A fork gives you options.

There is also something vaguely agricultural about it. The devil's pitchfork probably owes at least some of its visual ancestry to ordinary farming implements and older representations of pagan gods. Christianity was exceptionally good at taking the symbols of earlier religions, attaching them to its villains and allowing everyone a few centuries to forget where they came from.

The result is one of the strangest visual transformations in Western culture. An implement associated with gods, fishing, farming or the practical business of moving things around becomes an emblem of Hell.

And then somebody hands one to Belial.

Looking at historical polearms in a museum makes the whole subject even stranger because the fantasy suddenly becomes physical. These weren't objects invented by illustrators for demons to carry. Human beings actually designed them. Human beings forged all those hooks, spikes, blades and forks, attached them to long wooden shafts, and developed specific ideas about what each configuration was supposed to accomplish.

The assortment pictured below demonstrates just how creative we became once somebody discovered the basic formula:

stick + sharp thing = weapon.

After that, apparently, we couldn't leave it alone.

Eventually the sharp thing branched.

Then it grew hooks.

Then somebody added another blade.

And somewhere along the way we invented a weapon sufficiently diabolical-looking that centuries later an artist could put it into the hands of Belial and nobody would ask why.

Except me.

I want to know why.

Because if a weapon really can function as an appendage of personality, then Belial's ranseur tells us something about him before he ever says a word.

A handsome devil doesn't carry a club.

He carries something complicated.